Counting Cattle

A cowboy was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Montana when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?"

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his notebook computer,connects it to his 3G cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location whi ch he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an e-mail on his cellphone that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a database through an ODBC connected spreadsheet on his cellphone and, after a few minutes, downloads the response.

Finally, he turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the cowboy.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman," says the cowboy.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "how did you figure that out?"

"Easy," answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and it's plain to see that you don't much about livestock. This ain't a herd of cattle, it's is a flock of sheep.

Now, open your trunk and give me back my dog."

Nope. No cattle dog would let a stranger pick him up, much less put him in a trunk.